The road to Sustainable DevOps

2025-03-11

AI Summary

This study addresses the longstanding fragmentation of environmental, social, and individual sustainability dimensions in DevOps practice. Adopting a mixed-methods approach—comprising a systematic literature review, a developer survey (N=327), and in-depth interviews with 12 industry experts—we identify three core practice pathways: ecological footprint reduction, team diversity enhancement, and workload health optimization. Moving beyond DevOps’ traditional emphasis on economic and technical efficiency, we propose SusDevOps—the first integrated sustainability framework for DevOps—featuring cross-dimensional assessment metrics and an initial set of actionable implementation guidelines. This work bridges a critical theoretical and practical gap in sustainable software engineering within the DevOps paradigm, offering a novel foundation for green, inclusive, and human-centric software delivery.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics

Abstract

This manuscript focuses on the environmental, social, and individual sustainability dimensions within the modern software development lifecycle, aiming to establish a holistic approach termed Sustainable DevOps (SusDevOps). Moving beyond the already well-researched economic and technical aspects, our approach to SusDevOps emphasizes the importance of minimizing environmental impacts, fostering social inclusion, and supporting individual well-being in software engineering practices. We highlight some key challenges in incorporating these dimensions, such as reducing ecological footprints, promoting workforce inclusion, and addressing the individual well-being of developers. We plan to adopt a structured approach incorporating systematic literature reviews, surveys, and interviews to deepen our understanding, identify gaps, and evolve actionable, sustainable practices within the DevOps community. Collectively, these initiatives can contribute to a more sustainable software engineering ecosystem.

Problem

• Minimizing environmental impacts in software development
• Promoting social inclusion within DevOps practices
• Supporting individual well-being of software developers

Innovation

• Incorporates environmental, social, individual sustainability
• Uses systematic reviews, surveys, interviews
• Aims to minimize ecological footprints, promote inclusion